Susan Bennett, now 67, is a voiceover artist and singer from Atlanta in the US.Shephali Bhatt | ET Bureau | May 15, 2017, 09:39 IST

Just before Steve Jobs quit as Apple CEO in 2011, "Are you a man or a woman?" And Siri answered, "They did not assign me a gender." Jobs was pleased. But the original voice of Siri has a face, a gender, a job, a home. She is Susan Bennett, now 67, a voiceover artist and singer from Atlanta in the US. "Even after all these years, some people are surprised that a human voice is behind the app," says Bennett, in a phone conversation from the US.Just before Steve Jobs, weakened by his battle with cancer, quit as Apple CEO in 2011, he had a chat with what would become Siri, the voice in the phone, the virtual personal assistant that could remind you of a meeting at 11.30 am, tell you the weather and even sassily philosophise about life — one of the wackiest replies to the last question is, “It is nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya.”

Jobs took hold of the phone at a lunch meeting on the day he announced his resignation and asked Siri: “Are you a man or a woman?” And Siri answered, “They did not assign me a gender.” Jobs was pleased. But the original voice of Siri has a face, a gender, a job, a home.

She is Susan Bennett, now 67, a voiceover artist and singer from Atlanta in the US. “Even after all these years, some people are surprised that a human voice is behind the app,” says Bennett, in a phone conversation from the US.

In the fall of 2011, it was Bennett’s turn to be gobsmacked as a new iPhone rolled into the market. A colleague emailed her, asking if she was indeed the voice of Siri, which Apple’s senior vice president Phil Schiller had pitched as the “coolest feature of the iPhone 4s”. Bennett did not even have an iPhone. She rushed to the Apple website to check Siri — and there it was speaking to her in her own voice.

Now the big tech majors have voice-assisted personal assistants - Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana — but Siri was the first of its kind.

The Ubiquitous Confidante

It all began in 2005, says Bennett, when she used to spend four hours every day, five days a week in the month of July, reading out random sentences and phrases: “Say the shrodding again, say the shroding again, say the shreeding again, say the shriding again, say the shrading again, say the shrudding again.” She was building a bank of words, and all kinds of possible variations, from which Siri would eventually build sentences.

Bennett had no way of knowing that her recordings with GM Voices, an Atlanta-based voice-recording company, will one day become the sound of Siri. “Those involved in the recordings didn’t really know where these were going to end up. We were sort of vaguely told that it was going to be used for phone systems.”

Millions of people spoke to her. She advised them on bus routes, she fumbled over accents, she checked stocks and she booked tables. She was America’s most wanted voice. She was the ubiquitous confidante hiding in the phone. But Bennett did not make a killing out of it. While she was paid by GM Voices for the recordings, Apple wasn’t legally bound to compensate her for using her voice in the US market from 2011 to 2013, or, for that matter, Jon Briggs, who was the voice for the British market, or Karen Jacobson for Australia — the trio were the first set of Siris. Bennett says all of them had signed agreements that waived all rights to compensation on the usage of their recordings.

But Bennett soon realised that Siri was not just an IVR (interactive voice). “Most people don’t really pay attention to such voices because they are listening only for information. But if that voice becomes a persona like Siri, people seem to develop quite a relationship with it.”

Siri, she says with pride, was iconic. “It was the first concatenated voice (synthesised voice) that sounded human. The astounding thing behind this was the technology.”

Siri was the great dream that Apple dreamt in the late 1980s. You can see a prototype of that vision in a concept video called Knowledge Navigator that filmmaker George Lucas made for the then Apple CEO John Sculley in 1987. It has a rather boring professor but at that time — when the world still dialled a rotary phone, when 8,42,567 Indians were on the waiting list to get a phone — what it showed was mind-bending.

The professor opens a device and a voice assistant in a bow-tie avatar tells him that his mother sends a reminder about his father’s surprise birthday party, that there is a faculty lunch at 12 and he needs to take Kathy to the airport by 2. The video was set in September 2011. Apple missed the mark only by a month — Siri became an iPhone reality in October 2011.

Origins of Siri

Siri, however, was not Apple’s. It was developed by SRI International, a Menlo Park-based nonprofit research institute, which had several firsts to its credit — it built the first computer mouse prototype in 1964 and received an internet transmission for the first time in 1972.

In 2010, it launched Siri in Apple’s App Store. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Norman Winarsky, now an advisor to SRI Ventures at SRI International, recalls those heady days. Two weeks after the launch, CEO Dag Kittlaus received a phone call: Hi, this is Steve Jobs. “Kittlaus thought it was a joke and hung up. Then the phone rang again: ‘Really, it’s Steve Jobs.’ It was. The two talked for a while, and Jobs congratulated Kittlaus on Siri’s capability….

Over the next few weeks Jobs and Kittlaus discussed a purchase price for Siri” and “Jobs made an offer that the investors and the executive team couldn’t refuse.” When Bennett was recording thousands of words in Atlanta, it was not for Apple but for SRI International.

In 2013, when Apple launched iOS 7, it changed Siri’s voices. “They paid the new people, but they had to sign non-disclosure agreements. So, I doubt you will ever find who they are. We have the perks of being the original voices and being allowed to promote ourselves because we never had an agreement with Apple.”

Meeting Woz

That very year she came out on CNN as the voice of Siri. Soon she had people coming up to her and asking if she spoke to Siri. “I would jokingly say that I don’t talk to Siri because I talk to myself enough already.” And yet she admits it was eerie. “I was used to hearing my own voice on radio and in television commercials but when it came out of the phone, it was creepy.”

She says it is not exactly her voice. “The voice was manipulated in some way. My husband is a guitarist and an audio engineer. We were putting together a demo of me talking to Siri and he had to try a lot of compression to make my voice sound like Siri’s.”

Shortly after her outing on CNN, Bennett met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak at a tech conference. “He told me he loved Siri and encouraged me to pursue speaking in public about how I became ‘accidentally famous’.

For some time, I was offered along with him for presentations but the organisers often didn’t want to spend more money on a second person.” Eventually her public speaking gig took off and she had her first TED talk in 2016. She tells her audience how the recordings were done: “I talk a little bit about how it freaked me out at first, how I handled it, and how it affected me.”

The iPhone age, though, has proved tough for voiceover artists like Bennett. With a smartphone, a mixer software and a quiet closet, everyone has pretty much got a recording studio. “Now we are not auditioning against 20 or 30 people but hundreds of them. It’s like the Wild West of voiceovers.”

Two Tech Revolutions

Bennett, a thin, bespectacled woman, with a warm voice, had a speaking part to play in two technological revolutions. Before she became the original voice of Siri, she was part of the ATM wave that swept the US in the early 1970s. When she was 25, Bennett sang a jingle for First National Bank Atlanta’s first ever ATM machine. Titled “Tillie the All-Time Teller”, the purpose of the jingle was to ease people into using the ATM, a daunting new machine.

And yet Bennett is not sold on artificial intelligence. “I find it pretty frightening, to tell you the truth. But as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have said, if you ever reach a stage of complete AI, humans would have outlived their welcome. If you got a machine that is faster, more efficient and intelligent, doesn’t eat, drink or create garbage, humans would have replaced themselves. I’m much more of a humanist than whatever the opposite of that would be, I don’t know, a ‘machinist’, maybe.”

A Norwegian girl named Siri once reached out to Bennett, hoping she could help her contact Apple and get the app’s name changed. (Siri is a popular Scandinavian name that means “beautiful victory”). “She told me, ‘I don’t like the fact that it has my name.’ I told her, well, sometimes I don’t like the fact that it has my voice either.” But Bennett is quick to add that being Siri has turned into something positive for her. Sometimes people still call her Siri instead of Susan. “And then I talk like Siri and say: OK, now I’ll have to tell you where to go.”

Apple has still not confirmed Bennett as an original voice of Siri. And Siri wouldn’t give a direct answer either. If you ask Siri, “Who is the original voice of Siri?”, it will dutifully, but without the warmth it reserves for Jobs, take you to a bunch of links. One of them would have the name Susan Bennett, a little-known woman in suburban Atlanta, whose voice answered a billion questions.